Recipes: Chocolate, beyond Easter and dessert

DC Duby's Duck with Chocolate Port Reduction and Stewed Cherries

Photograph by: Handout
, Whitecap Books

Typical of love affairs, relations with chocolate can be difficult and crazy-making.

I did find a way to quell its worst hissy fit, which was to have a tantrum and seize up as I was making a mousse or a tart filling. The beautiful, glossy liquid would scream at me (I might have imagined that) and turn into an ugly, sulking, dull brown solid, with my mixing spoon stuck in it.

I know now that if I add warm cream and beg softly, as it seethes in the double boiler, it will return to liquid, albeit not as satiny as before — it’s not completely forgiving.

The Easter season for many, equals chocolates. Kids hunt for chocolate eggs in parks, filling up their little baskets. Easter bunnies don’t visit adults so we race to our favourite chocolatiers or, we might use Easter as a time-honoured excuse to make a chocolate dessert.

But hold it. Why just dessert? Who said chocolate was just a dessert ingredient? Just ask a Mexican. Or me, for that matter. I add dark chocolate to a lot of my cooking. My latest boeuf bourguignon needed something to blunt the sharpness of too much wine in the sauce. I added dark chocolate and loved it. I’ve added chocolate to steak sauce and to lamb sauce and to chili. Not to chicken, though, although perhaps I should learn from the Mexicans that chicken and chocolate do bed down well together. I recently made a Moroccan basteeya (with chicken) and now that I think of it, I think a little cocoa powder in the spicy ground almond layer would have been great.

Duby is one half of DC Duby Chocolates; he co-authored Wild Sweets Chocolate cookbook with wife Cindy Duby. They were into some modernist cookery techniques long ago, gelling ‘egg yolks’ and ‘caviar’ out fruit purees and other such prestidigitations.

“When matching chocolate to savoury flavours, you want to use bitter chocolate. Salt and bitter work very well together. To balance flavours, it’s not sugar, it’s salt you want. People assume chocolate should be sweet.”

Chocolate can thicken sauces as well as add flavour and fat content as well as complexity. In a way, it flavours like wine. “A lot of wine has chocolatey notes,” Duby points out.

“Chocolate is a very difficult product to work with,” says Duby. “There are so many parameters of time and temperature and moisture.” (Who but a chocolate geek can describe chocolate hissy fits in that way?)

“That’s why it’s a great product if one’s more scientifically inclined and interested to find out how to work with it. Right tools are valuable as is a thermometer that’s very accurate.”

That’s especially so in making chocolate bonbons. That’s when you have to get the tempering or crystallization process just right. Proper heating and cooling gives a nice glossy surface and ‘snap’ which also helps to remove them from the moulds.

“You have to melt the chocolate at 45 °C, then cool it to 27 or 29 °C, then reheat to 29 to 32 °C, depending on the amount of cocoa butter in the product,” Duby says.

The Dubys’ current creations involve smoking nuts and making products like smoked hazelnuts with cinnamon chocolate bars.

They’re also researching the level of antioxidants in chocolate at various stages of production, including at its raw stage, before fermentation as part of their collaboration with the Food Science and Nutrition department at the University of B.C.

(Cocoa beans are covered with banana leaves after harvest; heat and humidity ferments them, then it’s dried in the sun before it goes off to factories for roasting. That’s when it starts to develop the familiar chocolate aroma.)

“Fermentation is the most important step,” Duby says. “If it’s not properly fermented, like wine, it won’t make a good product.”

The Dubys’ relationship with chocolate is long term and committed and they’ll keep on exploring.

“We always say everything works until it doesn’t. We’re more than willing to try out any combinations,” says Duby.

Cooking with Chocolate, Savoury and Sweet

DC Duby's Duck with Chocolate Port Reduction and Stewed Cherries

Stewed Cherries:

16 dried cherries, halved

1 cup (250 mL) port

2 teaspoon (10 g) butter, melted

Freshly ground pepper

Place the dried cherries in a container fitted with a lid. Heat the port until it nearly boils, then pour on top of the cherries and seal the container immediately. Let this sit for at least 3 hours (overnight is best). Strain the liquid from the cherries and reserve for the Chocolate Port Reduction. Just before serving, briefly warm the cherries in a saucepan with the butter. Season with freshly ground pepper.

Chocolate Port Reduction:

1 small onion, finely chopped

1 clove garlic, finely chopped

1 small dried ancho chili

1 tablespoon (15 mL) olive oil

3 tablespoons (45 mL) red wine

Liquid from stewed cherries

9 ounces (25 g) 70 per cent dark chocolate, finely chopped

Saute the onion, garlic, ancho chili, and olive oil in a saucepan over low heat until the onions are translucent. Add the red wine and stewed cherries liquid and continue cooking until the mixture reduces by half.

Place the chocolate into a tall and narrow container; strain the hot liquid through a cheesecloth into the chocolate and blend with immersion blender until well combined. If needed, return the mixture to the saucepan and continue reducing over low heat, while continuously stirring until the desired consistency is reached.

Duck:

4 duck medium breasts

3 tablespoons (45 mL) olive oil

Salt and pepper to taste

Score the duck’s skin to render as much fat as possible. Heat the oil in a frying pan over high heat. Place the duck breasts in the pan, skin side down and cook until brown and crispy. Flip the breasts and season the skin. Reduce the heat to medium-low and continue cooking, 8 to 15 minutes, depending on size desired doneness. (8 to 15 minutes). Let the breasts rest for a few minutes, then slice.

Pipe or spoon some Chocolate Port Reduction onto a warm plate. Arrange one or more pieces of duck, some Stewed Cherries in a composition on the plate.

Add the water, flour and walnuts. Mix on low until well combined. (Don’t overmix.)

Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and freeze for at least 2 hours (overnight is best).

Preheat the oven toe 325 °F. Line a baking tray with a silicon mat or parchment paper. Using a box grater, grate the dough on the largest size blade and spread the strands evenly onto the baking tray. Bake until the dough is golden-brown (about 6 to 10 minutes). Let it cool, then crush the cookie strands lightly into small pieces. Store in an airtight container. Note that this recipe makes more than needed but the unbaked dough can be stored for several weeks in the freezer for other uses.

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